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Tings are unraveling in the last installment of The Book of Dust, the second of Philip Pullman's masterful trilogies set in a realm that manifests, here more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are failing, or restructuring themselves along novel and disturbing lines. An hidden force "is wrecking the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from states, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the treasuries of business empires, the hands of mobs. "Something is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says businessman a trader character, keeping a observant eye on the trade routes from his place in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were secure and strong are faltering and giving way."

Core Enigma and Her Quest

Exactly what that element might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that propels this final volume, which picks up where its predecessor concluded. This is, according to many, Pullman's last venture into the intricately constructed, deeply captivating realm he first introduced 30 years ago, with the publication of His Dark Materials. It's a domain whose landscape corresponds to that of the real world, but whose chronicles tacks and jibes with ours; where the individuals look and think and behave like us, but are paired by animal souls, beings in creature form; where the heavens are populated with witches and gryphons, but beneath those skies, vehicles are taken and tea is consumed, and mature professors carry Harrods shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first met as a young girl in the His Dark Materials trilogy, and then met once more as a infant in the prequel, the introductory book with which Pullman began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still recognisably the sharp and persistent heroine of the previous installments, but aged, sadder, warier, more doubtful. This limitation is heightened by her split from her animal guide, Pan – but it was also, ironically, the cause which made him desert her in the first place.

Merging Narratives

His choice to go off in quest of that innocent part of Lyra which she seems to have lost (an quality which he represents as her "creativity"), and her quest to reunite with him, were the incitements of its predecessor, which saw Lyra undertake a wandering journey across Europe and into the mountain region, meeting with amazement and peril on the way. But from the start, deeper currents were in action, and sinister powers at work. The religious council – the religious governing authority, and Pullman's masterfully eerie representation of rigid, procedural wickedness – is under recent guidance, and showing its strength. The antagonist – our protagonist's relative, who blames her for his sibling's death – has manoeuvred himself into the office of head of the authority's governing body, and is intent on using his recently acquired power to extend the religion's control. Another protagonist, who rescued young Lyra to safety along a swollen river as an young boy in the first book, is now an academic with a secondary role in spycraft: he is sent to a key location to discover more about the antagonist's aims. And underlying all of this is the puzzle surrounding the scarce and costly essential oil which appears mysteriously to be the origin of a social and financial disturbance spreading out from the region. The substance is viewed by various factions as a tradeable good, by others as a research-based or esoteric phenomenon, and by further factions – the fanatical "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of darkness; an challenge that must be destroyed. The dilemma of its origins, its meaning, and if it should be eliminated or preserved is becoming urgent.

Like the first series, Lyra's decisions, and her fate, are revealed to be deeply entwined with the fate of the world

In the previous volume, these plots ran mostly in parallel. In this final book, they converge. Like His Dark Materials, her actions and her path are revealed to be inextricably woven with the fate of the world. Her private quest to reunite with her soul and regain her imagination becomes the central struggle in a larger war with an oppressive government which, as these systems typically do, is seeking to suppress independence of thinking, originality and culture: all the personal, defiant ways in which humans can be liberated.

Dimensional Rifts and Moral Battles

The story starts with the finding of a collection of curious fissures in the structure of the world's atmosphere: windows that appear to open into different dimensions. A particular portal manifests to be the point of the fiercely disputed rose oil. The Magisterium, with the antagonist at its helm, classifies these windows as a challenge to the religion's orthodoxy and sets out to eradicate them. As the heroine begins to shift from strict rationalism and revert to instinct, however, her certainty that these locations must be preserved – that their significance and their value is mysteriously essential – strengthens. "Cosmic particles, or the substance, or the vision, or the field of roses, or whatever we label it," she says, "we require it." The scene for a poetic tussle between naivety and maturity is established.

Story Tempo and Personal Evolution

At over six hundred pages, The Rose Field|this volume|the